James Watt

James Watt was born in England in 1736. He was educated at home and as a teenager worked in his father’s business making navigation instruments for ships. As a young man, he went to work at the University of Glasgow repairing scientific instruments. It was here that he met and befriended Adam Smith. In 1763, he was asked to repair the university’s Newcomen steam engine. The large Newcomen steam engine had been invented in 1712 to pump water out of coal mines. Watt quickly realized that the Newcomen steam engine was terribly inefficient. It wasted about three quarters of its heat, which made it very expensive to operate anywhere except for coal mines where coal was very cheap. Watt recognized the large profits to be made from making an efficient steam engine. After this, Watt spent several years working on steam engines until he was able to build a faster and more fuel efficient steam engine that only used one-third the coal used by the Newcomen steam engine. Unfortunately, Watt did not have the money needed to start a business producing steam engines.

In 1775, Watt met and went into business making steam engines with Matthew Boulton, a successful business man in Birmingham, England, which was an important manufacturing city. Watt and Boulton worked well together because Watt had strong engineering skills and Boulton was a shrewd businessman. The first steam engines they produced were purchased by mine owners for pumping water out of the underground mines. In 1781, Boulton and Watt realized that the steam engine could be used to power many different types of machines and they began to sell

Richard Arkwright was born in England in 1732, the youngest of thirteen children. His family was poor and he was educated at home. As a young man, Arkwright worked as a barber. However, he was not happy with the work and realized that he could make more money if he made wigs from hair. While working as a wig maker, he invented a water proof dye that he sold to finance his work on inventing machines. In 1768, working with John Kay, a clock maker, Arkwright invented a spinning machine that could spin 128 threads at the same time. Up to this point, spinning thread was difficult work and a skilled spinner could only spin one thread at a time. In addition to being able to produce more thread, Arkwright’ machine was simple to use and unskilled workers could learn to operating with only a little training.

In 1771, Arkwright went into business operating the first water powered

Charles Dickens was born in England in 1812 to a poor family. When he was a child, his father was put in debtor’s prison because of unpaid bills and the young Dickens was forced to work in a factory. This experience had a deep and lasting impact on Dickens that he would use in his writings. Dickens went on to work in an office and then as a court reporter in London. It was during this time that he met his wife Catherine, with whom he would have ten children.

Dickens began to write fictional stories based on what he saw in the streets of London. These stories were published in newspapers in monthly installments and made Dickens a popular writer. His readers ranged from the wealthy nobles and industrialists to the poor workers, who would pool their money to buy his stories. His first novel was Oliver Twist, which told the story of an orphan living in the streets and included many points from Dickens’s own childhood. This novel and his other stories, like A Christmas Carol, made him famous in England and the United States. Dickens travelled twice to the United States giving lectures across the country. While in the United States he spoke out against slavery.

Dickens is known as one of the first realist writers because of the way he described the brutality of life in industrial England. This was clear in his novels Bleak House, which deals with the hypocrisy of British society, and Hard Times that described life in an industrial town at the peak of economic expansion. Dickens was very critical of the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and felt that his writing would make society aware of the terrible living conditions of the poor in the industrial cities, especially the children. Dickens spoke out on the need to help the poor and donated money to clean up the slums and build proper housing for the poor.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in Prussia in 1818, one of nine children. His father was a successful lawyer, who introduced Marx to philosophy and wanted Marx to

become a lawyer. At the University of Berlin, Marx studied law and philosophy and became involved in radical student groups. He received his doctorate from the in 1841, but his radical politics prevented him from procuring a teaching position. At this point began to work as a journalist, but the government shut down the newspaper he was writing for because of its radical politics.

In 1843, Marx went to live in Paris, which was the center of radical revolutionary politics in Europe. While he was there, he befriended Friedrich Engels. Engels came from a wealthy German family yet supported radical politics and used his money to support Marx for the rest of Marx’s life. After a year in Paris, Marx was expelled from France for his writings and he

moved to Belgium. In Belgium, Marx first learned about the idea of communism and began to organize communists across Europe into a single group. A group of communists in England invited Marx and Engels to join a meeting of the Communist League and write a document that described the goals of communism. In 1848, Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Because of the revolutionary statements in The Communist Manifesto, Marx was prohibited from living in most of Europe. He lived the rest of his life in England.

Marx spent his time in England working on researching and writing the book Capital. The book combined deep historical research and economic theory and described Marx’s communist ideas in detail. He published the first volume of Capital in 1867. The other two volumes of Capital were published after his death by Engels. In addition, in 1864, Marx was a leader in the First International, a meeting of radical revolutionaries from around the world which had the goal of uniting revolutionaries in a common effort to overthrow capitalism.

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was born in England in 1806 to a prosperous family. His father had a high position in the British East India Company and he educated Mill in the philosophy – by age 12, Mill had read all of the major philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Adam Smith. As a teenager, Mill became a supporter of the idea of Utilitarianism, that is based on the idea that society should be run in order to create “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” This thought was at the core of many of Mill’s later ideas. His father secured Mill a position working for the British East India Company and Mill would spend his whole life working in a high position in the company. In his early twenties, Mill suffered a severe case of depression that had been caused by the stress of his education. After the depression passed, Mill found that the experience moved him to become more critical of utilitarianism and develop his own thoughts.

In 1848, Mill the book Principles of Political Economy, which was the leading economics textbook for the next 40 years. In the book, Mill defended the ideas of capitalism developed by Adam Smith because it made society wealthier. However, Mill recognized that there were problems with capitalism and he argued that there was a role for the government in regulating the economy to make society better off. For example, he thought that worker’s hours should be limited and that the government should tax the wealthy and use the money to help the poor. Mill also believed that the government should support the education of everyone because that would improve the happiness of society.

Mill followed up his work in economics in 1859 with his book On Liberty, in which he described how government should work. Mill held to the idea personal freedom was the most important thing because free people will make choices that will make them happy, which means society would be happier, and that free people work to have the most fulfilling life. However, Mill also saw that there was the danger that free people might hurt each other. To deal with this problem, Mill developed the “harm principle” which said that the government could limit personal freedom “is to prevent harm to others." Mill believed that democracy was the best system of government and that everyone should have the right to vote, although more educated people should get more votes.

Mill was also a strong advocate for women’s education and right to vote. His wife, Harriet Taylor had strong influence on Mill’s thinking. She was well educated and Mill thought of her as his intellectual equal. In 1861, he wrote the book The Subjection of Women, which argued that women should have the right to vote. In 1865, Mill was elected to the British Parliament where he spent his time trying to win women political equality to men and being critical of the British government’s policy toward its colonies. After he left office in 1865, he spent the last remaining years of his life on fighting for women’s rights.